An abnormally large footprint — which some believe belongs to Bigfoot — has been discovered in a northern Ohio backyard.

Ashtabula County resident Wendy – she asked to have her last name withheld because she’s not sure she wants to be involved with Bigfoot stories – was doing yard work on Aug. 11 when she noticed a 7.5 inch wide footprint that was an inch and a half deep into the mud.

“I took a picture to show my mother’s husband, who’s a hunter, and he said it wasn’t a human’s,” she said. “I’m not claiming that footprint to be anything. I don’t know what that is.”

“I didn’t believe in the sasquatch before,” Wendy said. “And in fact I’m still fighting it. But I can’t make sense of that large footprint.”

She also reports hearing growls and knocks and recalls seeing a black figure running across railroad tracks some five years ago. Honestly, this is really dubious “evidence”. Bigfoot is not a likely explanation. No other explanations have even been explored. But then… ABC goes and interviews…wait for it… MELBA KETCHUM – a known Bigfoot believer who has told wild stories about Bigfoot encounters and is the author of the discredited Bigfoot DNA project.

“They’re not monsters; they’re a type of people,” she said. “The DNA shows that. The paternal side is novel, but the female side is 100 percent modern human (as in 13,000-15,000 years ago).”

Melba’s conclusions remain completely unsupported and the study was judged to be, I’ll be kind, not credible. Journalists really can’t seem to get a rational take on these stories can they. Or, they just don’t want to, and that is a public disservice.

Here is a report of a Bigfoot sighting in Ashtabula from early this week.

I wonder if it’s possible to plot media coverage of bigfoot on a graph like the bigfoot sightings.

I’ll bet you the spikes in sightings follow coverage. But that’s almost too easy, any media coverage of something increases awareness of a subject.

I’d love to see if there is something else that drives the coverage in the first place. Maybe it’s just “CNN covered it, and their ratings went up.” One news outlet has a slow day and so everyone follows up.

But, I mean, is there some trigger to start coverage of a flap? Time of year? Economic bad news? Who is buying advertising time?